South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Moreno struggled on road to blazing a trail
Actor details peaks and valleys of her career in new film
At 89, Rita Moreno has a lot of stories to tell. She hasn’t slowed down long enough not to. And while she’s reflected on many of them before, recounting much of the significant ones in her 2013 autobiography, “Rita Moreno: A Memoir,” she wasn’t quite prepared the first time she saw a cut of the documentary about her life.
“I literally went: ‘Wow, what a life I’ve had,’ ” she recalled. “It kind of surprised me in a way. You live your life thinking it’s just your life. And then somebody comes along and says, ‘Oh, no, it’s so much more than that. And it represents so much more than that.’ ”
“Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It,” which made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, explores the peaks and valleys of her personal life and decadeslong career that broke barriers even while being stifled by them.
Directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, the 90-minute film traces Moreno’s extraordinarily full life: her humble upbringing in Puerto Rico, the splitting up of her family — and the ensuing culture shock — when she moved to New York City with her mother as a young child, her struggles navigating Hollywood’s sexism and racism to forge a lasting career, and the turmoils of her most significant relationships, namely a tumultuous eightyear love affair with actor Marlon Brando that drove Moreno to attempt suicide, as well as her nearly five-decade marriage to cardiologist Lenny Gordon, who died in 2010.
What emerges is a portrait of resilience and of
a woman, eventually and resoundingly, finding her voice.
“I really wanted to have Rita be that inspiration to women that have gone through the same fights that she has been going through throughout her life,” says Pérez Riera.
Moreno allowed the director to follow her over seven months at various locations, including her home in Berkeley and on the set of the “One Day at a Time” reboot, in which she portrays matriarch Lydia Alvarez.
The act of reflecting on her life for this legacy project, she says, wasn’t a difficult process, which she attributes to the years in therapy she’s already spent assessing different areas of her life story.
“The hardest thing I ever did was learn to love myself,” she says. “And it’s so important to look back and reflect because you can
still learn something. More often than not, the kind of things I realized when I look back is, ‘Oh, that’s why that happened’ or ‘That’s why I did that.’ There’s power in that. It keeps you moving forward.”
And if anyone has moved forward, it’s Moreno.
She’s in the elite club of EGOT winners (people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony). She’s received the Peabody Career Achievement Award and the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime contributions to American culture. And she has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Arts.
There’s still more ahead. Perhaps still best known for her turn as Anita in 1961’s “West Side Story,” the veteran actor will appear in Steven Spielberg’s remake
of the classic musical — slated for release later this year — in a different role.
But Moreno’s road to blazing a trail for Latino actors who came after her wasn’t without its struggles. The documentary digs into the decades of typecasting Moreno endured early in her film career, often playing Latina “spitfires” or cast as the resident “native girl” with an accent.
“When I went to Hollywood, I really learned where I stood in the world, and it was so sad and frustrating,” she says. “There is something so awful about, if you were a performer, asking your agent to submit you for something and the people won’t even see you because they think you’re too Spanish or something. It’s so frustrating and you want to run and knock their door down and say: ‘Look, let me read this scene for you. I’m good. I’m really good. Let me. Watch me.
Listen to me.’ And you can’t do that. It was also so embarrassing to me that my agents kept getting turned down. I remember thinking, ‘Well, they’re probably not crazy about me as a client because I don’t work much.’ ”
Even after winning the Academy Award for “West Side Story” — and earning the distinction as the first Latina to win an Oscar — Moreno’s career didn’t experience a boost. She didn’t have any significant acting credits for nearly a decade, partly because she refused to play roles she felt perpetuated stereotypes. While some progress has been made in the years since then, Latinos remain greatly underrepresented in the entertainment industry.
“I don’t think our community has moved a whole lot in the eyes of Hollywood, and we’re all talking about that constantly,” Moreno says. “We have a long way to go. I don’t think that, in my lifetime, I’m going to see that change — I really don’t. I mean ... I’m 89.”
Some of the more harrowing parts of the film are when Moreno recounts the sexual harassment she often faced as an ingénue in Hollywood. One of the most shocking stories she describes is being raped by her agent.
“I never expected to talk about that,” she says. “It’s not exactly something like, ‘Oh, here’s one of the things I want the world to know.’ I was very hesitant because, believe it or not, though I am a rather direct person, there are certain things that are taboo simply because of the age in which I lived.”
Moreno says she’s grateful to have lived to bear witness to the collective power of the #MeToo movement and the conversations it has provoked.
“I think the #MeToo movement has played an enormous part in almost every woman’s life,” she says. “I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime. Women are getting stronger; there is a lot of bravery taking place. Women really think so differently now than they did when I was a girl. Oh, my God, I’m 89 and think of all the stuff I’ve seen and heard and experienced. I hope things only get better. It’s not just important for women; it’s important for men too. Men still have a great deal to learn, and there’s nobody like a determined women to show them and teach them.”
In the meantime, this determined woman has another lesson in mind for anyone who watches the story of her life. And it’s this: “It pays to dream and it pays to pay attention to your dreams. And there is an absolute payoff to hanging on and being stubborn and just falling down and getting up.”